A Collection of Ballads eBook

Huntly had a commission to apprehend the Earl, who
was in the disgrace of James vi. Huntly,
as an ally of Bothwell, asked him to surrender at
Donibristle, in Fife; he would not yield to his private
enemy, the house was burned, and Murray was slain,
Huntly gashing his face. “You have spoiled
a better face than your own,” said the dying
Earl (1592). James Melville mentions contemporary
ballads on the murder. Ramsay published the ballad
in his Tea Table Miscellany, and it is often sung
to this day.

CLERK SAUNDERS

First known as published in Border Minstrelsy (1802).
The apparition of the lover is borrowed from “Sweet
Willie’s Ghost.” The evasions practised
by the lady, and the austerities vowed by her have
many Norse, French, and Spanish parallels in folk-poetry.
Scott’s version is “made up” from
several sources, but is, in any case, verse most satisfactory
as poetry.

WALY, WALY

From Ramsay’s Tea Table Miscellany, a curiously
composite gathering of verses. There is a verse,
obviously a variant, in a sixteenth century song,
cited by Leyden. St. Anthon’s Well is on
a hill slope of Arthur’s Seat, near Holyrood.
Here Jeanie Deans trysted with her sister’s
seducer, in The Heart of Midlothian. The Cairn
of Nichol Mushat, the wife-murderer, is not far off.
The ruins of Anthony’s Chapel are still extant.

LOVE GREGOR

There are French and Romaic variants of this ballad.
“Lochroyal,” where the ballad is localized,
is in Wigtownshire, but the localization varies.
The “tokens” are as old as the Return
of Odysseus, in the Odyssey: his token is the
singular construction of his bridal bed, attached
by him to a living tree-trunk. A similar legend
occurs in Chinese. See Gerland’s Alt-Giechische
Marchen.

THE QUEEN’S MARIE—­MARY HAMILTON

A made-up copy from Scott’s edition of 1833.
This ballad has caused a great deal of controversy.
Queen Mary had no Mary Hamilton among her Four Maries.
No Marie was executed for child-murder. But
we know, from Knox, that ballads were recited against
the Maries, and that one of the Mary’s chamberwomen
was hanged, with her lover, a pottinger, or apothecary,
for getting rid of her infant. These last facts
were certainly quite basis enough for a ballad, the
ballad echoing, not history, but rumour, and rumour
adapted to the popular taste. Thus the ballad
might have passed unchallenged, as a survival, more
or less modified in time, of Queen Mary’s period.
But in 1719 a Mary Hamilton, a Maid of Honour, of
Scottish descent, was executed in Russia, for infanticide.
Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe conceived that this affair
was the origin of the ballad, and is followed by Mr.
Child.

We reply (1) The ballad has almost the largest number
of variants on record. This is a proof of antiquity.
Variants so many, differing in all sorts of points,
could not have arisen between 1719, and the age of
Burns, who quotes the poem.